


yesterday don't matter if it's gone

by fakeboi



Category: Drop-Out (Webcomic)
Genre: Drabble, F/F, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-10 09:50:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10435071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fakeboi/pseuds/fakeboi
Summary: lola shows sugar an abandoned house they've been drawing in-- a slightly incoherent, uncapitalized drop-out fanfiction i wrote right after dissociating. enjoy.





	

"shhh, shhh, shuuuhuhhsh," sugar whispered, her tail jittering. lola disguised a smile. motes of dust floated in the dead air, unbroken by the footsteps that sugar had imagined. lola stepped forward, one nub in front of the other. they remembered reading that it was a quiet way to walk. they felt like they'd read it somewhere, but not just once. it had come at them from more than one direction. 

"i'm sorry, you're right. there's nobody upstairs," said sugar, "it just really messes me up somehow that we're down here during the day. it's trespassing... i mean, not like it matters, that we're breaking the law or something like that, but it's trespassing."

"it's, heh, it's okay," said lola. sugar bared her teeth the way she always did, half-grimace and half smile. her eyelid twitched. lola thought about the way that sugar looked from the side, the way her forehead swooped into the bridge of her nose. lola watched the light play across sugar's hair. 

"we can go, if you want," said lola. 

"no," said sugar, "i want to stay." sweat beaded in the fur between her eyebrows, but she shook it off in a quick, violent movement. she looked at the rotted wood paneling on the basement ceiling, illuminated by a ufo-looking-beam that shot from the smashed window. sugar had made lola pick out every piece of glass, wearing gardener's gloves. so it would be safe for both of them. having wanted it, needed it, maybe-- that made sugar's nausea float to her chest when she thought about it. it made her whole body dizzy, sometimes. needing things. lola's sets of eyes flickered between sugar and the window.

"the daring book for girls," lola muttered. that was where they'd read it, a long time ago. a book their mom gave them, telling them how to sneak by, where to put their feet. like on a tightrope. sneaking by like an "indian", they remembered it saying. whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean.

"huh?" asked sugar. 

"nothin. sorry. just... thinking out loud," said lola. "nobody cares," they continued, "if we use this place. s'long as we don't sleep here." they pointed a flashlight under their chin, like they were telling a camping-tent ghost story. then they grinned.

"no, yeah, right. do you wanna take your art stuff out?" sugar said. 

"sure babe," said lola, their voice drifting across the room. they threw open the flap of their bag like curtains from a window, and plucked out charcoals that they held carefully between their fingers. sugar looked on, saucer-eyed. she had never once moved so quickly, she had never once moved so easily. she offered lola a slow, cautious smile. she felt it stretch her cheekbones. she hoped it looked real, looked natural. maybe it was those things, but she wasn't sure how that was supposed to look. 

lola tugged a rolled-up piece of pallid gray newsprint from their bag, and shook it out. they spread it across the floor, their hands sliding outwards across it. they thought about the hesitating, broken movements they had made when they first started drawing. the sketchy, angular, ill-connected lines. they made a big, sweeping stroke: the shaft of light running from the window to the back wall. lola wished that someone had just shown them how to make those lines, that they could've learned by imitation. they'd fallen backwards into the way they made their art. they held their charcoal wrong, always had. it snapped in their fingers. they snatched another one off of the cracked ceramic tile floor, and kept shading in the disintegrating boards on the ceiling. 

"that's so good, wow," said sugar. 

"naw," said lola, "it just t-- that's nice. glad you think so."

"do you make your, um, music down here too?" asked sugar? 

"nope," said lola, "i got another place i go for that." sugar thought about asking "would you show me that sometime", but the words didn't form right in her head or her throat. it didn't matter, she thought. here, this was good. she was trusted. her hands shook, making the beam of her flashlight shiver. she watched lola's hands again, instead of her own. they were so quick, it looked so easy. she knew it wasn't, she'd heard that it took ten thousand hours to be an expert in anything. she wasn't sure if that was true or not, but she knew it would take even longer for her, if she tried. her slow, shitty fingers. 

video games had been this huge point of pride for her, when she held down the dial to sprint for the first time. that soaring feeling when she got really good, when it was muscle memory, when all of a sudden she was doing something easy. but she still couldn't make something like lola's charcoal. lola watched the darkness waver across the ceiling, and heard sugar's messy breathing behind their back. they pictured sugar in their mind's eye, completing the busywork of filling in black space. they thought about the way the light had hit her just a minute ago. lola wanted to remember that for a long time. sugar heard lola start humming, tonelessly. lola didn't even notice that they were doing it, it didn't register to them over the sound of their vine charcoal scraping across newsprint, hitting the bumps in the broken tile. 

sugar recognized it. it was a song lola half-remembered from when they had still listened to the radio, which was long ago enough that they didn't like to think about it. it belonged in a trash bag, in a metal donation chute. it was something lola wanted to drive away from. they heard themself and stopped humming, but sugar had already recognized the tune. it was something that her ma had listened to wistfully once in a while, tapping her toes on the thick carpet. it played so loudly in sugar's head that she could almost hear it in her ears. sugar watched lola's shoulders move, their arms flowing back and forth. lola remembered the second place she had heard the advice-- in an internet guide for exploring abandoned houses. they had already tried it by then, but some time later, they were trawling the web to see how other people did it. "walk along the edge of the wall, one foot in front of the other. the danger of falling through the floor IS present." 

"goooood byyyyee, ruby tuesday, who could hang a name on you..."

**Author's Note:**

> i imagine that lola's mom listened to the rolling stones version of ruby tuesday, but sugar's ma liked the melanie safka cover better.


End file.
